The Fall of Home

The Roman Empire lasted 500 years. The American empire has stood for half of that time. The Roman Empire took the first step towards its ultimate destruction about halfway through its era when the original Empire was split in two, creating the Western Empire, based initially in Rome and the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople, now modern-day Istanbul. The Byzantine Empire became more prosperous and powerful, diverting resources and attention away from the Western Empire, which eventually collapsed.

During the last centuries of the Western Empire, many factors contributed to its decline including military overspending, reliance on dwindling slave labor and political corruption.

The American Empire began its demise when the Confederate States attempted to split from the Union and in the aftermath of the Civil War, seeds of anger and resentment were deeply planted. We now see the necrotic bloom of those seeds and their fetid fruit.

The dream of America, the shining city on the hill, the strongest, richest, most powerful democracy on earth, has been revealed to be the emperor with no clothes, a house of cards, whose foundations have been eaten away during the last few decades. Neither political party is blameless, but the architecture of the long game to neuter the Federal government, to strip the social support structure built over the last century and replace egalitarian democracy with a plutocracy formed by tax policy initiated by Reagan that shifted the majority of wealth to the top 1%, is owned by the Republican party.